2021 Coaching Report: Benchmarking a Coach's Practice and Business by Yvonne Thackray
Executive Summary
Benchmarking best practices in coaching is challenging when little information exists about:
How coaches consistently deliver rigorous coaching impactfully to their clients, and
How coaches can develop their practice and business in a systematic manner.
Most of the published reports and articles analyze the effectiveness of a tool, model, or coaching process to deliver results with the assumption that every coach is an idealized individual who acts consistently, with perfect knowledge of coaching and seeks to maximize potential in a perfected coaching framework.
With these assumptions in place, coaching practitioners may be led to believe that coaching is an equal and fair playing field for anyone who decides to pursue it as a career. Without a coherent guidance and framework of how to progress and develop as a coach that fits both market expectations and the self-regulated requirements to be a coach of professional standing, opportunities to deliver coaching as a service may become limited and seen simply as a commodity. This is more so if AI is perceived to deliver the basics of coaching better than humans. Hence, the reality of being a coach can be quite different to what we idealize the ‘coaching individual’ to be.
Every coaching practitioner is unique. The ‘approach and ‘style’ a coach applies is influenced as much by who the individual is, as by the common skills and techniques that a coach will use to add value with their clients. Incorporating the latest accessible and available knowledge in coaching can help optimize aspects of a coach’s practice. Integrating them into how a coach practices will impact their overall coaching approach with deep expertise. To use a simple analogy, coaching is like riding a bike.
When we first started to learn to ride a bike, we might have added training wheels to the rear wheel (attending a coaching programme).
After gaining confidence, the training wheels have been taken off as we develop our own style of riding, which may even progress to externally customizing our bike to make it go faster, ride better, hold more things etc. (attaining coaching qualifications and other certifications whilst building a business and applying acquired coaching models).
And then, we may finally become curious about all the different components that make up the bike itself i.e. the ergonomic design, the material used, the manufacturing process and its assembly in order to make some innovative breakthroughs that improves the overall ‘basic’ performance (developing his/her unique coaching practice and model) before needing to add yet another range of enhancements for specific purposes (to continue broadening and deepening a coach’s business and practice).
When a coach reaches this level of curiosity and actively maps out their practice, and they periodically integrate newly acquired coaching skills, techniques, school of thoughts etc., their mastery of coaching will deepen, and their approach will become more consistent and robust. As a result, a coach becomes more confident in delivering even better results for their clients, capable of benchmarking their practice against peers to strengthen their individual coaching expertise and broaden their coaching knowledge, and collectively raise the standards of coaching.
Addressing this gap in understanding is an area which the good coach has been working in for the last decade with over 100+ coaching practitioners around the world writing and publishing what coaching is for them in their business and practice. 2021 seemed a good time to reflect and integrate our latest understanding as we continue our mapping exercise[1] of where coaching is.
We invited coaching practitioners (external coaches, internal coaches, and managers as coaches) to participate in our first practitioner survey on the current state of good coaching practices which draws upon the insights from the good coach community knowledge base[2] and from the good coach working model[3]. We designed the survey to be experiential by structuring it to not only be an exchange of information but also a considered developmental exercise around a coach’s practice. The survey was added to Surveysparrow and tested for survey logic, bias and ease of completing before being released. Emails were then sent to the good coach community and published as part of a campaign on LinkedIn requesting for participation. We also encouraged those who took part to also forward it to others who would be open to taking part[4]. The following message was shared to encourage participation in the survey,
“Working as a coach can be a lonely endeavor. There is no standard formula for developing your business, and it is often challenging to confidently know how you perform relative to your peers. As coaches we all benefit from learning from each other, and we have designed this practitioner survey to do just that. Not only do we want to understand your best practices, we hope that it will also provide insights into your own potential development areas as you grow your coaching business and practice.”
The survey was open for two months (Jan to March 2021). All participants were given the option to participate anonymously[5] and survey motivation was monitored at the beginning and towards the end of the survey. 78% reported maintaining their motivation across the survey and almost a third of these identified that their motivation had increased by the end. The participants’ feedback provided us with confidence that they found the survey useful and interesting to participate in even when it took on average 45mins to complete. Patterns and themes were then identified using a simple thematic approach and data analysis. All analysis was performed using Microsoft Excel Pivot Tables.
The results shared in this report aims to fill in key gaps on:
What it takes to be a coach, and
What’s involved in having a sustainable career in coaching.
Where useful, we’ve also added some key insights and frameworks for coaches to consider alongside their own practice. It’s worth noting that success in this report is defined as having at least 5+ years coaching experience and earning a living[6] that’s equivalent to the average salary in their residence country.
At the good coach, we hope that this first step[7] into benchmarking a coach’s business and practice will broaden the possibilities and understanding of what coaching can deliver, and this will lead to:
Better preparation for novice coaches to begin their journey (business and practice), and for experienced coaches, the curiosity to map their practice as they master their coaching journey.
Enhanced capability for connecting a coach’s impact to measurable outcomes for delivering a coaching service rather than a commodity.
A diversity of quality coaching products and services to work on independently and/or
co-create collaboratively with peers.Engaging coaching membership representatives to consider finding more innovative ways of raising the standards of coaching and advocating for more inclusivity in the diversity of ways that coaching can make a positive difference.
Our top 10 Key Insights
99% of coaches start with an aspiration to make a positive difference during an individual’s life; 1% start with a vision of the future and connect that with where individuals are now to enable change.
75% are both very proud of and highly confident in their coaching.
A sustainable coaching career takes at least 5+ years of perseverance and effort
Coaches who use the same title e.g., executive coach, do not signal to the market that they have a similar approach, rigor or aspirations but rather the title identifies the clients they are most likely to work with.
A coach’s average age is between 44 and 55 years.
Coaches capture impact using behavioural (87%) and observable (23%) measurements that can also be monitored by the clients and sponsors.
62% work either as an associate with multiple brokers or service providers (31%) or have their own bespoke business and accept some associate work (31%).
A coach’s portfolio typically follows the 80-20 rule. Roughly 80% is focused on work (of which three quarter’s will be spent on coaching and the remaining on other work), and the remaining 20% is split with three quarters of the time focused on business development and admin and the remaining on professional development.
All coaching practitioners believe in upholding their coaching professionalism with almost 80% holding at least one or more credentials/accreditation.
95% of coaches practice self-care either daily (75%) or weekly (20%) to maintain their fitness to practice.
References:
[1] To date, this will be our fourth iteration with the good coach community and an invitation to the broader coaching community. The first exercise was carried out in 2014, the second in 2016 and the third in 2017. To read how we’ve progressed since 2014 check out the preface and table of contents for more details.
[2] In January 2021, the good coach knowledge base includes over 350 blogs, 3 books and 1 magazine, and has reached nearly 58,000 practitioners.
[3] To be published with Open University Press in 2022/23
[4] We applied snowball sampling i.e. our direct participants reached out and recommended other like-minded participants to complete the survey.
[5] We followed the good coach ethical framework for data collection (see Definitions)
[6] Age and stage in life has a significant influence on earnings.
[7] We appreciate that there are limitations to this study based on survey participants, geography, types of coaching practitioners, and deeper understanding of each coach’s practice and the researcher’s interpretations.